Economists often argue that the net benefits from immigration are on as strong an intellectual footing as the net gains from international trade. The Independent Reviews symposium on immigration leads with a dissent from this view, by esteemed Harvard University professor George J. Borjas, followed by replies from two other economists.

Immigration to the United States has increased substantially in recent decades,
rising from about 330,000 per year in the period 196170 to 1,050,000 per year
in the period 200915 (Cohn 2017).1 In the process, the foreign-born population
has risen from 9.7 million to 43.2 million, with the portion of foreign born rising from
5.4 percent of the population to 14.1 percent (Lopez and Radford 2017)not far
below the record of 14.8 percent in 1890. This pattern is not unique to the United
States: 20 percent of Canadas population is foreign born, and nearly 30 percent of
Australias population were born elsewhere.

In a familiar historical pattern, high levels of immigration have made immigration
policy a potent political issue. Unsurprisingly, the topic has drawn keen attention from
social scientists. Many American economists argue that theories demonstrating positive
net benefits from international free trade in goods and services also carry over to
the free movement of workers. One noted exception to this economistic perspective
is George Borjasauthor of a stream of important research articles on the economics
of immigration and a recent, influential book: We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the
Immigration Narrative (2016). This symposium features Borjass overview of the key
arguments and evidence in his book and two responses to his essay.

Borjass central argument is that immigrationlike tradeproduces winners and
losers. Its net benefits may (or may not) be positive, but this tells us little because its
most noticeable impact on individuals and communities is redistributive. In an essay
published in this issue of The Independent Review, he estimates that [i]mmigration is
responsible for a huge redistribution of wealth, totaling around half-a-trillion dollars
per year, from native workers who compete with immigrants to those natives who use
or employ immigrant labor. Immigration also has important effects on the fiscal health
of the republic, but this impact is exceptionally tricky to parse out. As Borjas puts it in
this essay, Perhaps it is time for us experts to admit the obvious: we have little clue
about how immigrants affect the cost of providing public goods, and we have no clue
about the future path of taxes and government spending. Accordingly, all the
available estimates of the long-run fiscal impact of immigration are useless.

In his response to Borjass essay, Benjamin Powell argues that Borjas has it wrong.
Instead of clarifying the picture, Borjas has obscured it. Instead of unraveling the
narrative on the impact of immigration, he has raveled it. Powells most fundamental
critique is that Borjass argument almost completely ignores the primary beneficiaries
from immigrationthe immigrants themselves. Once the immigrants count in the
calculus, the net gain of immigration to the United States is truly massiveabout
$2 trillion a year. Powell also critiques Borjas for ignoring a crop of recent studies that
show that supposedly worrying negative side effects of immigrationsuch as its
impacts on total factor productivity and institutional qualityare not so worrisome.

Garett Jones widens the debate beyond the narrowly economic to include political
feedback loops from immigration. He argues in his essay in this symposium that the
recent surge of populism in the United States and Europe may be a shared symptom
with a common cause: high rates of immigration. If so, the costs of immigration may
greatly exceed the standard costs estimated by economists because the backlash against
high levels of immigration may include an erosion of social trust and a weakening of the
institutions and policies that have fostered long-term economic flourishing.

Borjas, Powell, and Jones end up raising far more questions than they answer. If
Jones is correct and American institutions have begun to change due to the surge of
immigration, might these changes come not only from the reaction of American-born
voters but also from the preferences and culture of immigrants, too? Carlos Newland
(forthcoming) shows that attitudes toward markets vary considerably from country to
country. His Free-Market Mentality Index shows that Anglosphere countries, such
as the United States, have unusually favorable attitudes toward free marketswhich
probably explains why their economies are freer and more prosperous. As more immigrants
arrive from places where people are less favorable toward free markets, will the
political equilibrium shift away from market-friendly institutions? Has this shift already
begun to occur? Theres an elephant in the room that all our authors have (prudently?)
ignored. Immigrants to the United States clearly do affect the location of the median
voter. In the past few presidential elections, people with backgrounds in Latin America
and Asiathe primary source of recent immigrationvoted by more than two to one in favor of candidates (such as Barack Obama) who generally favor significant expansion of
governments role in the economy (Krogstad and Lopez 2016).

Politics is the art of compromise. Powell holds out the possibility of a political
trade in which immigrants compensate the native-born workers with whom they
competemaking immigration a winwin proposition. Someone who cares only
about the welfare of natives and does not count the welfare of immigrants at all would
have to be thoroughly uncreative not to be able to design tax and redistribution
programs that could redistribute . . . some of the $2 trillion in gains away from the
immigrants and to the native-born population (perhaps to those who compete with
immigrants?). And yet this grand package hasnt been implemented and garners very
little attention in todays debates. Economists are often too optimistic about the
potential for Coasian bargains with side payments to make it through the political
process intact. As is often the case, then, either this task is harder to achieve than
economists imagine, or our political entrepreneurs are not as creative as we envision.

Powell asks another important question: Would the addition of another 40
million immigrants to the United States require any more aircraft carriers or nuclear
missiles? Wont immigration allow us to spread the fixed costs of public goods across
more taxpayers, reducing the burden on each? Economists might answer in unison that
immigration wont require any additional defense spending because defense is a classic
public good. But politics is a tricky business. Is unchanged military spending the likely
political equilibrium? If there were 40 million more taxpayers adding to the coffers,
would the addition to military spending really be zero?

In the interdisciplinary spirit of The Independent Review, we hope that these
articles will push readers to consider immigration in its broadest context. Attitudes
about immigration policy ideally wont simply boil down to a matter of Who are you
rooting for? as Borjas asks at the end of his essay. But they often do. So who would
a caring person favor? The striving immigrant from a far-off country, trapped in
a dysfunctional economic and political system? Or the American-born worker with
whom the immigrant is most likely to compete, perhaps the one who dropped out of
high school or community college in a poor urban or rural area, who faces a life of low
economic status in our less-than-perfect political system? Reasonable people will differ.

Notes

1. This figure omits illegal immigration, but the latter variable is partially picked up in the estimates of the
foreign-born population.